Here is a Palm Sync horror story:
When I first converted to the One True (green) Faith, I gave my
Visor to my technology-hating wife. At first she used it to read the NY
times, then she gradually started keeping notes and lists in the thing.
She never really got into the habit of backing up, just occasionally
syncing to our Linux box. This ended up working out reasonably well for
her. Anyway, she recently decided to install Ultrasoft Money to use as a
checkbook register. She chose this, because it is the only one that will
sync with M$ Money, and I can get that for cheap. For reasons beyond my
comprehension, Ultrasoft supplies a custom Win32 installer for this,
which uses Palm Desktop to install the Palm app for you without you
having (or being able to) interact with Palm Desktop. No prob. We just
booted into Windows, installed Palm Desktop (we'd never sank to
Windows), and installed. You can guess the rest. The Ultrasoft Money
installer fired up Palm Desktop to install the Palm app. Palm Desktop
went "Oh, this is the first time you've sank. Lets see... Oh, here is a
bunch of Outlook crap, I'll just sync that with the Palm". Ta-da!
Suddenly there was a bunch of my Outlook crap from work on her Visor,
plus Palm Desktop had removed a bunch of her stuff from the Visor, for
reasons of it's own. Plus, it removed a bunch of her folders, keeping
only the default Palm folders.
Of course, she freaked out and stomped around the house for a
few days, cursing like a sailor. We booted back into Linux, I made a
copy of the Palm databases that she sank to, just in case something bad
happened, and she sank. No joy. The Visor evidently uses timestamps to
decide what to keep and what to change during a sync, and the changes
were newer than her last sync on the Linux box. Good thing I made copies
of those databases. I restored them, and we tried it again, in "desktop
overrides Pilot" mode. This was better. Of course, the stuff she'd
written down since her last Linux sync was gone, but at least it was
better. Except that her non-default folders were still gone. Along with
everything that was in them.
Again she stomped, sailors fleeing in terror. After a while, she
figured out that all her stuff that used to be in the deleted folders
was still around, just "orphaned". It didn't show up in the "unfiled"
folder, but it did show up (with no folder at all) in "all folders". So
she went through by hand, re-filing everything. After a bunch of blood,
sweat and cursing, her Visor was back (more or less) to the way it was
before she installed Ultrasoft Money.
After we hashed this whole thing out to her satisfaction, she
started doing semi-regular backups. Not syncs, but backups. She's also
started keeping all her important stuff on her eMate, using the Visor
for a few lists and quick notes. I think if she had a smallish Newton
(maybe I'll buy her a 130 for her birthday), she'd forswear the Visor
completely.
The moral of this story? Beware "one button, no hassle
convenience". Synchronizing stuff between a trusted handheld computer
and a desktop is complicated stuff, and if you're not making the choices
about what happens, the choices are still being made for you. Just like
that Rush song ;-)
The Obligatory Newton Content, by the way, would be the stuff
about her eMate. My wife is an aspiring novelist, and she's been
wrestling with a laptop running Windows 98 for years now, cursing the
entire way. We recently bought 3 eMates from PowerOn to use in home
schooling our kids. Corey snagged one for herself, and thinks it's the
greatest thing since sliced cheese. After messing with it for one
evening, she had me move all her writing from the laptop to the eMate
(she has a 6MB card for it), and literally threw the laptop away. Well,
gave it away, at least. Happily, we now have more Newtons in the house
than any other computer. More Newtons than humans in the house, as
well...
Jim Anderson
Evil Overlord Rule 222:
I reserve the right to execute any henchmen who appear to be a little
too intelligent, powerful, or devious. However if I do so, I will not at
some subsequent point shout "Why am I surrounded by these incompetent
fools?!"
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 16:02:31 EST